Our memory is not a Ramadan TV fad

Amid the annual deluge of Ramadan television dramas, a new series has emerged under the solemn title “The Caesar: No Place, No Time”. It purports to recount stories from the Syrian revolution, including the fate of detainees in the prisons of the former regime. Yet from its opening moments, the production reveals itself to be thin, superficial and, most alarmingly, detached from the reality Syrians endured for more than a decade. It feels like a sanitised retelling; a version of events carefully trimmed of any demand for accountability. 

Clearly, the series’ creators never experienced the torment of detention, nor of life under siege, chemical attack, forced displacement and barrel bombs. They never had to bury friends in hurried graves.

The show makes little effort to conceal its lack of research. For instance, the detention portrayed by one of the series’ heroines bears no resemblance to ours. I saw no trace in her eyes of the terror we felt during interrogation, nor that particular anguish which comes when your name, your face and your voice are taken from you.

One scene made me laugh — though bitterly — when the interrogator grasps her arm to show her a video on her phone. The creators evidently do not realise that we were dragged into questioning blindfolded, unable to see even the outline of the room. An interrogator touched us only to beat us. We were not worthy of being held by the arm like human beings. We were numbers — bodies without value. I do not recall a single interrogator ever addressing me by name or meeting my gaze. What I remember instead were insults and obscenities.

The gravest aspect of this production lies not merely in its artistic weakness. The choice of the name “Caesar” constitutes a brazen appropriation of a powerful human rights symbol that has formed the backbone of international legal efforts to pursue accountability.

To transform that name into consumable drama at a moment when justice has yet to be delivered is to hollow it out. It repackages a living wound within a “safe” narrative that neither names the perpetrator nor indicts him. Matters were made worse by the director’s flippant remark that “there are restaurants called Caesar too”, and that he did not mean “our Caesar” — the one we revolutionaries honour.

“The Caesar” is not alone. Another Ramadan offering, “Mawlana”, ventures into similarly fraught territory. It opens with a protagonist arrested for his revolutionary opinions and charged with “undermining the prestige of the state” and “insulting the President” — offences for which Syrians once died. Those fortunate enough to survive live with the absurd irony that they were accused of shaking the pillars of a police state merely by speaking.

In this instance, the portrayal of interrogation is more convincing. When I saw the black hood pulled over the character’s head, I was transported back to my own time in the State Security branch. I used to call it the “Guantánamo bag”, having first seen such images in footage from that distant prison before experiencing the suffocating darkness myself.

Yet even here lies a danger. To recycle our pain in episodic form, to replay it annually as seasonal content, does not serve the cause of truth. It risks trivialising it. In the end, it becomes little more than a backdrop for advertising breaks; another Ramadan circus to sell brands of rice and cooking oil.

Transitional justice in Syria has scarcely begun. Where gestures have been made, they often seem inverted, at times offering leniency to perpetrators while victims remain unheard. Files have not been properly opened. Perpetrators have not been held to account. The fate of tens of thousands of forcibly disappeared remains unknown. Syria’s collective memory hangs suspended, heavy with unanswered questions. In such a context, art cannot afford to detach itself from truth or treat memory as a ready-made commodity for dramatic adaptation.

More troubling still is the impact of such productions on the mothers and fathers of the disappeared. Are their sons and daughters alive or dead? How is a mother, who has spent years scanning lists and clinging to rumour, to endure a Ramadan drama that borrows the image of detention, reenacts fragments of suffering, yet offers no truth, no accountability and no clear acknowledgement of the crime?

We need time — perhaps years more — for our wounds to close. Only then can we bequeath to future generations a revolutionary legacy rendered in art that tells the whole truth. Not productions that hover above it, selling advertising space while the blood beneath has yet to dry.